Bavarian youth council urges stronger Holocaust education

With few eyewitnesses to Nazi persecution still alive, the Bavarian Youth Council is discussing how remembrance education can reach young people. BR reports that the debate took place at the council’s plenary meeting in Nuremberg.

At the Max Mannheimer Study Centre in Dachau, an educational centre run by the Bavarian Youth Council, a school class from Hagen in North Rhine-Westphalia is spending a week studying the Nazi era. The centre is close to the Dachau concentration camp memorial. Students are asked to consider what they can learn from history for their own lives and how they can support democracy.

Educational director Felicitas Raith says a key aim is to help young people understand the structures of antisemitism and racism. Learning about the lives of people persecuted and murdered by the Nazis can make those issues less abstract, she says. Many young people have little contact with Jewish people, while encountering antisemitism online without necessarily recognising it.

The students have studied Nazi propaganda through photographs and newspaper articles, which showed how Jewish people were portrayed using stereotypes and negative traits to encourage hatred. They also heard survivors’ accounts and visited the memorial. Student Elias Brinkmann said the crematorium and the eyewitness’s account were deeply upsetting. Emilia Steffen said the size of the former concentration camp made the history feel close.

Bavarian Youth Council President Philipp Seitz said learning at memorial sites leaves a lasting impression on young people. Nuremberg, where the Nazi Party held its rallies, is another important place for this work. The city’s mayor, Marcus König, described it as a “city of perpetrators” and said education should connect the past with the present.

Seitz said youth work is also work for democracy and should promote diversity, tolerance and respect for humanity. He called for strong organisations, adequate funding and reliable support for youth education programmes.